Atlas is a fully featured, high performance, 100% customizable UI kit, built by Layer to power communications interfaces in any app. If you want to learn how to integrate chat in your iOS app, take a look at Implementing Chat/Messaging in iOS apps with Layer.

Atlas does provide quick customization of some common options. But it also assumes some pretty rigid defaults which are not easy to change unless you are willing to spend some time digging through it's codebase. One such thing is when you want to show avatar on both sides of the conversation. By default, the ÀTLConversationViewController only allows showing avatar on the incoming messages.

Add avatars on Outgoing Messages

To add avatars on outgoing messages, we need to subclass the ATLMessageCollectionViewCell and override its methods to make the avatar visible. There are three steps here: